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From: Michael Paquier <[email protected]>
To: Ashutosh Bapat <[email protected]>
Cc: Andres Freund <[email protected]>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: GetBufferDescriptor() being called for local buffers from MarkBufferDirtyHint()
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:40:38 +0900
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAExHW5uzRMYVZsXXS3HXXT0fG_sNrpUhUqwP4NorhaCqH9JDhA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAExHW5uzRMYVZsXXS3HXXT0fG_sNrpUhUqwP4NorhaCqH9JDhA@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Jun 06, 2026 at 01:37:42PM +0530, Ashutosh Bapat wrote:
> 82467f627bd478569de04f4a3f1993098e80c812 added MarkBufferDirtyHint()
> which invokes GetBufferDescriptor() even for local buffers for which
> id < 0. Since GetBufferDescriptor() declares id as uint32, -1 is
> converted to a very large int32 value which is way larger than
> NBuffers. Thus GetBufferDescriptor() may be returning something from
> the BufferBlocks which probably has enough memory to accommodate that
> memory access. But it's a bogus BufferDesc nevertheless. We are not
> seeing any problem with this right now since MarkBufferDirtyHint()
> uses the BufferDesc only when it's a shared buffer. Right fix is to
> let that function handle local buffers first and then call
> GetBufferDescriptor() as in the attached patch.

@@ -5831,8 +5831,6 @@ MarkBufferDirtyHint(Buffer buffer, bool buffer_std)
 {
     BufferDesc *bufHdr;
 
-    bufHdr = GetBufferDescriptor(buffer - 1);
-
     if (!BufferIsValid(buffer))
         elog(ERROR, "bad buffer ID: %d", buffer);
 
@@ -5842,6 +5840,8 @@ MarkBufferDirtyHint(Buffer buffer, bool buffer_std)
         return;
     }
 
+    bufHdr = GetBufferDescriptor(buffer - 1);

Yep, that's clearly wrong.  We are lucky that it does not blow up
today but that's a ticking bomb.  Even with that in mind, the result
leads to a non-defined behavior.

-    return &(BufferDescriptors[id]).bufferdesc;
+    BufferDesc *bdesc = &(BufferDescriptors[id]).bufferdesc;
+
+    Assert(bdesc->buf_id == id);
+
+    return bdesc; 
[...]
-        BufferDesc *buf = GetBufferDescriptor(i);
+        /* GetBufferDescriptor() expects buf_id to be set in the descriptor. */
+        BufferDesc *buf = &(BufferDescriptors[i]).bufferdesc;

I am not convinced by these two.  For the first one, the assertion is
a bound check in disguise, which could also use NBuffers as of an (id
< NBuffers).  With the inlining we care about the performance.  This
also forces the second change in ShmemInit(), which makes even less
sense once we think about the first assertion.

Will fix the first issue on HEAD, that's wrong.  Thanks for the
report.
--
Michael


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